Intel's Silvermont architecture revealed and more

Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles, including Acer Aspire A5600U-UB13 Review, In Depth: OS X 10.9: what we want to see from Apple's new Mac OS, The next Atom: Intel's Silvermont architecture revealed, Cooler Master Eisberg 240L Prestige Review, and HP ElitePad 900 review

ROCCAT Kone XTD Gaming Mouse Review @ ThinkComputers.org

When I got my hands on this mouse, I was thrilled to be doing the review. The German company ROCCAT is one of the top of the line gaming peripherals companies around today, very well known in Europe. Their USA launch started in 2012 and has been making a big impact with gamers. They started out with the Kone, then came the Kone[+], and now the Kone XTD, their flagship mouse. This mouse is powered by an 8200 DPI Pro Aim R3 laser sensor, a commanding 32-bit Turbo Core V2 72MHz ARM MCU processor, and the most advanced Tracking & Distance Control Unit around all working in clockwork unison to deliver world-beating battle ability.

The Acer Aspire A5600U-UB13 is a nice looking all-in-one desktop PC with a solid feature set and acceptable, though not exceptional performance. It's a decent all-in-one desktop at a decent price, but there are better systems out there for not much more money.

The big mobile network operators spend a tremendous amount of money advertising how their coverage and speeds are better than their competitors. If you believed everything you saw on TV, you would have to think that in fairly populated areas of the USA that there would be no chance of a dropped call or slow download speeds. In reality, this is not the case, and the best marketing can't do anything for technology that can't possibly be everywhere you need it.

I live 42 miles from the heart of New York City, and despite being one of the most densely populated regions in the country, with millions of wireless subscribers to satisfy, my home happens to be in a dead zone for all of the major operators. The T-mobile and AT&T maps claim there is coverage that they respectively describe as 'satisfactory' and 'moderate', while Verizon's coverage map is fairly honest showing a good sized void of coverage over my property. There are some hills and trees which contribute to this situation, but if you position yourself in just the right spot in the backyard you can actually get decent call coverage and strong 4G signal. This doesn't help if you want to use your phone in or near the house, but it does make a strong case for installing a product like the Wi-Ex zBoost SOHO DataBlast YX550-VLTE-AWS.

In Depth: OS X 10.9: what we want to see from Apple's new Mac OS @ Techradar

The previous major release of OS X, Mountain Lion, was largely a hit, boosting the system's feature set and security; however, it also mangled some iOS features into the mix that didn't work terribly well, such as iCloud documents, and a sub-standard full-screen mode.Still, that didn't stop OS X Mountain Lion enjoying strong sales. According to Apple, more than three million people downloaded the OS during its first four days on sale, and it's pretty much topped the Mac App Store charts ever since.OS X 10.9 release dateThe eighth major release of OS X, Lion, arrived only a year after its predecessor, and the same was true with Mountain Lion. The expectation was therefore that we would see a preview build of OS X 10.9 in February or March and then a shipping date of July 2013.

Not Like a Fine Wine: Windows Activation Still a Piece of Junk After All These Years @ Techgage

This past Friday night, I did the only thing any single, lonely male would do: I played my MMO. During a quest, Windows 8 decided to kill my character with a full-screen activation nag screen. For those unaware, everything in Windows you don’t expect to be full screen may very well be in Windows 8. At the time, I didn’t think to screenshot this prompt, because I didn’t anticipate what was to come.

Because I find it silly in this day and age to call tech support and A) Riddle off your credentials, B) Riddle off your 25 character product key and C) Listen to someone riddle off a 25 character key back, I opted to seek out cracks to solve my issues rather than do the “legal” thing. Two cracks later, I got nowhere. Perhaps they work for some people, but they didn’t for me.

Tablets are the wave of the future! They are becoming more powerful, more capable, and have more bells and whistles. Today we have one of the latest tablets from ASUS, the VivoTab Smart 10.1" tablet. The VivoTab Smart runs a full version of Windows 8, is powered by a dual core Intel Atom processor, and has 64GB of storage built in! Read on to see how it performs!

If you're looking for great portability, tablets are certainly the way to go. Tablets are typically smaller and light than ultrabooks, though they don't have the power of an ultrabook. There are certainly some tradeoffs, but depending on your needs a tablet like the ASUS VivoTab Smart may be exactly what you need. Tablets are light and can easily fit into places such as a briefcase, purse, or even into the pockets of some jackets and pants making them great for on the go. The ASUS VivoTab Smart that we've been looking today at is great for those looking for productivity on the go and has some distinct advantages over some of the tablets out there...

It has been almost exactly five years since the release of the first Atom branded processors from Intel, starting with the Atom 230 and 330 based on the Diamondville design. Built for netbooks and nettops at the time, the Atom chips were a reaction to a unique market that the company had not planned for. While the early Atoms were great sellers, they were universally criticized by the media for slow performance and sub-par user experiences.

Atom has seen numerous refreshes since 2008, but they were all modifications of the simplistic, in-order architecture that was launched initially. With today's official release of the Silvermont architecture, the Atom processors see their first complete redesign from the ground up. With the focus on tablets and phones rather than netbooks, can Intel finally find a foothold in the growing markets dominated by ARM partners?

Since their debut five years ago, Intel's Atom microprocessors have relied on the same basic CPU core. Next-gen Atoms will be based on the all-new Silvermont core, and we've taken a closer look at its underlying architecture.

We review the Cooler Master Eisberg 240L Prestige, a 240mm Liquid cooler that is performing nicely, brought to you in a AIO LCS kit package (All-in-one Liquid Cooling Setup) that can actually be upgraded. The Eisberg series has been pending for a long long time now as it is not your typical all in one liquid cooling kit with the Eisberg series you can change tubing, get fitting that can be removed. So basically you can add or change loops, add or change your coolant. Pretty interesting really, and it finally reached the European market, hence the review today. But can it keep up with similar Asetek based products and their own Seidon series ?

Cooler Master designed this product with a water-cooling specialist that you guys all know from the reviews here on Guru3D, Alphacool from Germany. The combined effort resulted in a fairly compact water-cooling system called the Eisberg Prestige. While you can change out stuff, this kit is all-in-one. Install it and you'll have it working as the Eisberg prestige comes pre-filled, sealed and tested.

For today's review we'll be examining the 240L Prestige model; armed with two 120mm fans and a 240mm radiator it is one of the more easy to install products we have tested to date. However, as stated the market is fierce and competitive, will the Seidon 240M be able to hold ground against the new grub from NZXT and Corsair?

The DT01ACA300 3TB drive from Toshiba features good performances and are in fact rebadged Hitachi HDS723030BLE640 units, a newer version compared to the drives we have tested in the past (as external enclosures). The DT01ACA300 are priced quite good and we would like to recommend them for home users which need more storage space.

Newer components require less power and are much more efficient, producing less heat overall and therefore requiring lower fan speeds to cool off. This thermal headroom gives the video card greater overclocking potential and increased stability. Each video card manufacturer offers a unique cooling solution, promising further lower temperatures and even quieter performance than reference models. One of these manufacturers is PowerColor, a long-time AMD partner who has attracted the attention of enthusiasts with their HD7990 Devil13 video card design. Applying their creative focus towards the GPU mainstream market, PowerColor is offering their take on the recently released AMD HD7790 Bonaire GPU.

The PowerColor HD 7790 Turbo Duo video card uses a custom single-heatpipe copper heatsink design with a pair of silent 80mm fans for active cooling. The HD 7790 Turbo Duo from PowerColor also comes out of the box with a factory overclock of 1075MHz, compared to the 1000MHz boost clock of the reference Radeon HD 7790. For display output, the PowerColor HD 7790 is equipped with two DVI ports, a full-sized HDMI port and a full-size DisplayPort with full AMD Eyefinity support for 3 or more displays. Through the AMD Catalyst Control Center, or through a future update to PowerColor's own Power Tuner Up utility, users can overclock the HD 7790 for better performance under the latest DirectX11 games. For even further performance increase, the PowerColor HD 7790 Turbo Duo can be Crossfired with another HD 7790 allowing it to outperform more expensive and higher end video cards.

The ROCCAT Kone XTD was a bit of a flash back to the previous ROCCAT Kone and Kone[+], with near identical looks and features. Its added weight kit and 4-LED lighting scheme allowed for a rather personalized setup. Unfortunately the software was the ultimate fail in both the XTD and Pure mice. The installer crashing while it installs and crashing while writing to the mouse are two major no-no's. That's the last thing I need to happen when I'm just trying to customize my mouse. I could deal without the flashy imagery as long as the mouse works and the settings I want to change actually send to the mouse. Despite my anger with the software, I ultimately enjoyed the XTD.

There are several major factors you must consider when selecting a new case for your current system, or selecting a new case for a new build. Although Futurelooks isn’t in the business of recommending specific PC chassis’ to people, we are in the business of showing people what to look so they can see what they want or need. For example, many of us think that we need an enormous full tower to get all the performance out of a system, when in reality, we might need the “right sized” case. And that’s why we’ll be looking at a Small Form Factor (SFF) PC chassis called the Fractal Design Node 304 which gives a lot of features and functions in a smaller foot print.

Today we are taking a look at a case from Aerocool which happens to be the new Xpredator gaming case. I have not had the chance to review Aerocool products in the past so I’m really looking forward to this review, the case seems filled with cool features.

The case we are looking at today is part of the ECA3250 series of cases by Enermax. There are 3 models in this series; one in black, one in White/Black (predominantly White) and the one we are looking at in Black/White (predominantly Black).

The Olympus XZ-10 occupies the lucrative premium compact camera space that seems to be ever-growing in the number of options available to consumers.These cameras offer much more than a bog-standard compact, and certainly much more than a smartphone. Generally offering full manual control, other inviting features include fast aperture lenses and raw format shooting. Olympus already has the XZ-2 at the very top of its lineup, so this XZ-10 is intended to be the Lite version of that camera, with similar specifications in a smaller body, and at a slightly cheaper full price point of £349.99 / US$399.99 / AU$499. As such, the Olympus XZ-10 is in direct competition with the likes of the Nikon P330 and Canon PowerShot S110, both one step below in their respective company's compact lines.